Deforestation

Does deforestation need to be stopped?

The oaks and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what "the story of the trees" would be to us if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand. ~Author Unknown, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938
However in our time deforestation, the process of cutting down, burning, and damaging forests is occurring at an alarming rate. Forest are a vitally important part of the planet to the environment, humans and animals. They provide home to millions of animals, they ...

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trend and in the past 20 years no significant decrease in the deforestation rate has been recorded. We need to stop destroying our forests before its too late.
Tropical forests are are geographical areas of unique biodiversity. It is important to the biological health of the planet as diversity contributes to resiliency. Despite only 6% of the Earths surface area been covered in rainforest, approximately 80-90 per cent of the entire species of the Earth exist there. Due to massive deforestation, about 50 to 100 species of animals are being lost each day. The outcome of which is the extinction of animals and plants on a massive scale. Also many of the world’s medicines have arisen and developed from species discovered in tropical forests, and in destroying the forests via deforestation we are irreversibly loosing the chances of possible future medicines. 40-50% of pharmaceutical drugs in the market have an origin in natural products, with 42% of the sales of the 25 ...

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